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Our Lonely First Duffer

To many of us who play golf and generally suck at it—that’s me, and most others—it is less a game than a subtle form of torture, a walking stress position. Other sports may be more physically taxing, but none tests one’s character so severely—nerves, integrity, honesty and above all temper. (If you’ve ever four-putted from 20 feet or chunked an easy chip into a sand trap, you’ll know what I mean). Naturally, because golf is so hard on the psyche as well as the wallet, it is unusually revealing about the true nature of people—and, of course, presidents. “If the people wish to determine who is the best candidate, put all the contenders on the golf course,” the golfing great Gene “The Squire” Sarazen once remarked. “The one who can take five or six bad holes in a row without blowing his stack can handle the affairs of the nation.”

That quote appears in a delightful 2003 book, First Off the Tee, by the investigative journalist Don Van Natta Jr., who observed that we could learn a lot from the fact that the last 11 presidents going back to Eisenhower (with the exception of Jimmy Carter) have been fairly obsessed with the game. While detailing their worst habits on the course, Van Natta implied it was no accident that some of the biggest presidential cheaters at golf—Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton—were also some of the biggest liars in the Oval Office. Clinton, for example, was notorious for taking what Van Natta called “Billigans”—a play on “mulligan,” golfing parlance for a do-over (which is not allowed under the rules).“If you want to learn about Bill Clinton’s character problem, you don’t have to subpoena Whitewater documents,” conservative commentator Byron York once wrote. “Just watch him on the golf course.”

And what of the current First Duffer? After authorizing airstrikes in Iraq, and despite sharp warnings about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, this weekend Barack Obama is headed off for another hack-a-thon on Martha’s Vineyard—his regular August getaway—so it seems like an appropriate moment to ask what this revelatory sport can tell us about No. 44, who by all accounts has become increasingly obsessed with hitting little white balls into tiny holes.

Though a mediocre golfer, Obama is believed to be an honest scorekeeper, which perhaps should reassure us—if only a little—about the official statements coming out of his White House. He is also known for maintaining his preternaturally calm demeanor on the course as well as off. “I’ve never really seen him in a bad mood,” frequent Obama golf partner Alonzo Mourning, the NBA great, told my POLITICO colleague Jennifer Epstein in late April, saying that Obama looked relaxed even when he was dealing with the 2013 government shutdown (from the course, of course).

But golf is revealing about this president in other ways. It has become, more and more, Obama’s refuge from public life—and, perhaps, from what even some friendlier critics are wondering will be seen as a partially failed presidency. Obama himself, who has pretty much given up his first sporting love, basketball, because of a fear of injury (according to Mourning), has said that playing the game is a way “to relax and clear my head.” Yet even a relatively sympathetic pundit like the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank recently questioned whether it was wise for the 44th president to be tallying 180-plus rounds during his much-troubled tenure (compared with only 24 for George W. Bush in eight years), writing: “Is golf really so important that Obama is willing to handicap his political standing?”

What tells us even more about this particular president than his escapist passion for golf, however, is his routinely narrow choice of playing partners over the past five and a half years. Let’s start with the basics: Golf is probably the most social of sports. It is a game virtually designed for getting to know people and expanding one’s networks—for schmoozing, unmonitored understandings out in the open air and private winks over the 19th hole.The self-loathing we hackers experience while playing it is partially relieved by golf’s convivial and lubricous nature (typically helped along by substantial drinking after the torture is done), as well as the opportunities for empathy, commiseration and a lot of good, manly trash talk.

To abuse Clausewitz, golf—like war—can be a continuation of politics by other means. ““You are picking up so much about people’s personality traits, their humor, whether they’re jerks,” says David Rynecki, author of Deals on the Greens: Lessons in Business and Life from America’s Top Executives. “This is even more true in politics than business because so much of politics is driven by personality, and you get a chance to know and understand that.”

It is already well-known, of course, that golf is often the businessman’s choice for the mysterious process of male bonding (for some reason the same doesn’t hold as true for female bonding, but I’m not going there). Golf is not only social, it is irredeemably clubby, a way for our powerful one-percenters to get even cozier as they divide up our economy among themselves (you don’t find many antitrust prosecutors on the links). According to a much-cited survey of business executives from 20 years ago, “Golf and the Business Executive,” prepared for Hyatt Hotels by a New York-based research firm, 93 percent of those polled said playing golf was a good way to establish closer relationships with business associates, and more than a third said some of their biggest deals were done on a golf course. This has also been true of politics, and presidential golf, at times in the nation’s history: Lyndon Johnson, the master of congressional vote-wrangling and a 24/7 politicker, was said to have collected senatorial yeses for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and other legislation while golfing.